An Unfortunate Meeting

An Unfortunate Meeting

Eventually there was nothing else to do—I had to leave the trailer and I had to do it without slinking around, afraid of seeing Ian or Rae or anyone else who might be harboring unfavorable feelings towards me. I did, however, go out with Kyle at my side. I was being a little more brave than I might otherwise have been—that didn’t mean I was being more stupid than I would have been. I had no desire to repeat the unfortunate experience I’d had when I’d gone out the last time.

I was tense as we sat down in the dining hall tent thing—or whatever you wanted to call it. Kyle noticed. “What’s the matter?” he asked me—slightly more irritated than concerned. He had been sleeping when I’d gotten hungry, and I’d more or less insisted that he get up and go get dinner with me, and that he could go back to bed as soon as we were done eating. Long story short, that hadn’t exactly made Kyle too happy. I mean, he had come, but he wasn’t too happy about it.



But approximately four minutes after we sat down and started eating, I was very, very, very glad I’d made Kyle come with me—

Ian walked in, with Rae. Nobody else. Just him and Rae, as if they were dating. God, it would have been bad enough if all I’d thought was that they were close enough friends to be having dinner together with no comfortable buffer. But no—I knew what was really going on here. It sickened me, it really did.

Rae saw me and offered a beaming smile. Again, if I didn’t know better, I might have thought her look to be free of malicious glee. It looked innocent enough, that was for certain. And outsider might have thought that she smiled a smile that said she liked me, was happy to see me, or was just being polite, perhaps. But it wasn’t. I knew it wasn’t. Her smile was gloating. It said that she had won and I had lost and God damn it, there was nothing I could do about it. To the victor goes the spoils.

My God, I hated her then. I hated her so, so much. I hated her more than I had ever hated anyone before.

Kyle noticed where I was looking—Ian still hadn’t caught on to this silent exchange, thank God—and muttered, “Aw, hell. I don’t need this right now. I’m freaking tired.” He tugged on my hand to try and make me look away from Rae—at least I assumed that that was his goal in tugging so insistently—but I was enthralled by our staring match, one of perfect pleasantries and falsified smiles, that I couldn’t bear to look away. I was going to win, God strike me down if I wasn’t.

And I did. Eventually Ian said something to her (again, thank God, he hadn’t followed Rae’s line of vision) and Rae looked away, and offered him her innocent smile. Bitch. Even as Kyle tugged, I couldn’t stop myself from watching them. Less than a week ago, that had been me on Ian’s arm, coming in to eat and laugh and be happy. I couldn’t tell from where I was if he looked happy or not. I was inclined to think he wasn’t, but maybe I was just projecting. I wanted him to be happy, but I wanted him to be happy with me. And so maybe I was being selfish by wanting him to be unhappy with Rae.

But I especially wanted him to hate her. I hated her. More than that, though, I wanted him to break her heart. I wanted him to make her so miserable that she felt like she would never stop crying. It was vindictive and cruel and unfair and wrong but I wanted it more than anything else—anything else besides not being back with Ian myself, that is.

Giving up on the tugging, Kyle just smacked his hand into the table, drawing my attention with a jump—my attention and the attention at half the people at the tables around us. I glared at him. He smiled a sarcastic, sleepy smile. “What?” I demanded, annoyed.

“Can we just eat?” he asked, almost sounding as if he were begging. But of course that was wrong; Kyle simply was not the kind of boy who begged. It just didn’t work that way. I hadn’t even known him that long and I knew that much. “I seriously did not come here to ogle your ex and his skank of a new girlfriend. You said you were hungry. I said I was tired, but I still came, and I really just want to go to bed.”

With a surreptitious look over my shoulder to where Ian and Rae were sitting, I sighed and moved as if to pick up my tray. “I’ll take this with me,” I offered. “I can eat outside and you can go to sleep. It’s nice out.” And it was. The weather was nothing short of beautiful in the past few days, and I had been too busy hiding to enjoy it. I honestly wouldn’t have minded sitting outside for a half an hour or so. It probably would have been nice, actually.

But Kyle heaved this gigantic sigh, as if I were some sort of hideous burden, and mumbled, “No, we’ll stay. Just eat, though. I really don’t want to have to get into it with that guy, and it sort of feels like that’s what it’s going to come to.”

I thought about saying, “Don’t fight, please,” but I knew it would be words wasted on deaf ears. If Kyle was going to get into a fight with Ian he was going to get into a fight with Ian, and there was nothing I could do but hope it wouldn’t happen. So I instead started eating as quickly as I could without looking like I was eating too quickly or puking. Neither of those were particularly favorable outcomes.

But maybe I should have eaten more slowly, or maybe it didn’t even matter because something or someone, somewhere out there (though I had a fairly good idea who and where, it wasn’t a definite) had it in for me; as soon as I finished and had put my plate away and grabbed a dozing Kyle by the hand to take him home, Rae and Ian made the same walk towards the exit.

Maybe I should have stopped. Maybe I should have made Kyle stop. But Ian had seen us—I saw the flash of recognition in his eyes—so I had to keep going, no matter how much I did not want to. I had no problem in delaying our first meeting since the revelation of my infidelity. I really had absolutely no problem with it whatsoever.

A feeling started from my head and dripped down to cover my whole body. It was like I couldn’t make my face, my posture, show any sort of emotion. I tight feeling, almost as if I were just about to cry, pulled at the corner of my eyes. But I didn’t feel like crying. I felt empty, devoid of emotion. I felt almost as if I would never feel anything ever again.

We met several feet from the door. I spoke first. “Hello, Ian.” My voice sounded the way I felt—empty, monotone, bland. My eyes started to burn a little. But I still did not feel like I was going to cry. I hadn’t yet cried much.

And that seemed bizarre. After all, Ian was my husband. People cried over their husbands even when their marriages weren’t breaking up. And right now, that looked like that was where mine was headed. I was pretty steadily miserable—at least, I had a feeling that this was misery, though I wasn’t sure—but I hadn’t yet shed the number of tears I would have thought I would. I had cried more when I watched Hope Floats for the first time.

“Hey, Sloan,” he muttered back. Ian sounded likewise numb. Kyle and Rae were the tagalongs, the witnesses to this unfolding drama. Or maybe they didn’t even recognize the drama unfolding behind these bland, polite pasts. Not that it particularly mattered, either way. It wasn’t any of their goddamned business. This was something between Ian and myself and nobody else, no matter how much they may want to be involved.

I didn’t let it go there. I should have said something like, “I have to go,” and left. Surely nobody would have thought worse of me for it. But no—in an unparalleled stroke of masochism, I asked, “How have things been?”

In retrospect, it was a stupid question. Ian had probably had a week that was significantly work than mine. At least I had brought it on myself. For Ian, this whole thing had come out of nowhere. But gamely he nodded and said, “Well enough.” I knew him well enough to tell this was a lie. I felt bad that I was happy to see that he had had just as hard a time of things as I had. Bitter, yes. True, also yes.

“And you?” he asked in return, finally getting an expression—sort of a pained one. I assumed he only asked to be polite.

“Well enough,” I agreed. He nodded at me. I nodded at him. Then for a moment, and uncomfortable silence took over.

Kyle tugged on my arm. That damn boy was always tugging—but this time I was incredibly grateful for the distraction. I looked at him as Ian looked at his feet. “We should go,” Kyle said loudly, perhaps a bit too loudly. “Dave and Keel are going to be looking for us.”

It was Rae who agreed. “Yeah, we should, too, Ian. Mark and Pete wanted to practice tonight, remember?”

Ian nodded and offered an apologetic glance. “Yeah, we should. I’ll see you later, Sloan.”

There sure was a lot of nodding going on. I nodded, too. “Good to see you,” I lied. It hadn’t been good, at all. It had been sort of painful. But that was, I gathered from teen dramas and movies, what you said to your ex.

Oh, Jesus Christ. Ian was my ex. Ian and I were apart. I had never been an ex anything before.

Rae was the one who grew tired with our delay, with the pleasantries that kept us all together for precious moments more. (I may or may not have found that I didn’t particularly want to leave Ian’s presence, now that I was in it.) “Let’s go,” she sniped. Then she grabbed his arm and pulled him out the door ahead of us. God, but she was bossy. Ian shot me a last look over his shoulder.

I gave them a few seconds to be gone. Kyle’s hand was still on my arm. Then I mumbled myself, “Let’s go.” Outside, it was dark.

We were a few feet away when Kyle demanded, “What the hell was that all about?” He looked sort of irritated. I didn’t understand why.

“What do you mean?” I asked, genuinely curious. I hadn’t seen anything particularly offensive about the exchange, unless Kyle had seen how clearly hung up I still was on Ian. That wouldn’t have been a good situation.

He shot me a look that asked if I was quite simple. “You’re kidding me, right? He’s your ex. You were out with me. You give the uncomfortable smile and move on. You do not stop and talk, no matter what happens.”

“Why not?” I asked. Because as the bizarre, rapid catharsis left me, I was sure of one thing.

One Thing of Which I Was Sure:
I did not want to lose contact with Ian. I had spent one week out of contact with him. And this was not an experience which I wished to repeat.

Not talking to Ian when I saw him was a surefire way to losing contact. If we got in the habit of just giving that tense, terse, uncomfortable smile, we would most likely stay in that habit forever, and I simply did not want to stay in a habit like that one.

But Kyle only shook his head at me like I was a simpleton. “Jesus, Sloan, what happened the last time you tried to get over an ex?”

“There was no last time.”

Ah, the painful first.

Now he seriously seemed to think I was insane. “You’re serious?” he asked.

I felt ashamed of my positive answer. “Yes.”

He shook his head again. “Okay, so you seriously married the first guy you dated. I hope you realize just how insane that is. Haven’t you ever heard those thousand and two songs about shopping around or whatever the hell they call it?”

I mumbled that I supposed I didn’t. Kyle finally seemed to catch on that this conversation made me even more uncomfortable than my conversation with Ian had. “Forget it, Sloan. Forget I said anything.” He sounded repentant.

“Don’t worry about it,” I mumbled back. God, we were too wrapped up in these feeble apologies and niceties to ever get anywhere.

So I just took his hand and started back towards the trailer. And I made up my mind—I resolved that the next time I saw Ian, I would talk to him again. And the next time I saw Ian, I wouldn’t have Kyle with me.